(Source: University Press of Mississippi)
The University
Press of Mississippi is publishing a book on the legal history of the state of
Mississippi.
ABOUT THE BOOK
In A Legal History of Mississippi: Race, Class,
and the Struggle for Opportunity, legal scholar Joseph A. Ranney surveys the
evolution of Mississippi's legal system and analyzes the ways in which that
system has changed during the state's first two hundred years. Through close
research, qualitative analysis, published court decisions, statutes, and law review
articles, along with unusual secondary sources including nineteenth-century
political and legal journals and journals of state constitutional conventions,
Ranney indicates how Mississippi law has both shaped and reflected the state's
character and, to a certain extent, how Mississippi's legal evolution compares
with that of other states.
Ranney examines the interaction of Mississippi
law and society during key periods of change including the colonial and
territorial eras and the early years of statehood when the legal foundations
were laid; the evolution of slavery and slave law in Mississippi; the state's
antebellum role as a leader of Jacksonian legal reform; the unfolding of the
response to emancipation and wartime devastation during Reconstruction and the
early Jim Crow era; Mississippi's legal evolution during the Progressive Era
and its legal response to the crisis of the Great Depression; and the legal
response to the civil rights revolution of the mid-twentieth century and the
cultural revolutions of the late twentieth century.
Histories of the law in other states are
starting to appear, but there is none for Mississippi. Ranney fills that gap to
help us better understand the state as it enters its third century.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JOSEPH A. RANNEY teaches legal history as
adjunct professor at Marquette University Law School and is partner in the
Madison, Wisconsin, law firm of DeWitt Ross & Stevens S.C. In addition to
numerous articles on American legal history, he is author of In the Wake of
Slavery: Civil War, Civil Rights, and the Reconstruction of Southern Law. His
Trusting Nothing to Providence: A History of Wisconsin's Legal System was
honored by the American Library Association as a notable book on state and
local government.
More information here
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